I’ve recently enjoyed reading Paul Pedley’s book, Essential law for information professionals (3rd edition). Best read a chapter at a time, it gives a practical introduction to the many areas of law you may encounter in your work in an information context. I particularly liked how he used examples of real cases to illustrate how library staff have become embroiled in legal action and what the outcomes and learning points were.

Here are some of my gleanings:

Do you know the difference between R and TM? ® is a registered trade mark and ™ is an unregistered trade mark

An escrow agreement is recommended if using cloud computing services – it is an agreement to require the service provider to deposit their source code and related materials with a neutral third party. If release conditions are triggered (e.g. service provider goes into administration) the customer can access the application, their own proprietary data and intellectual property which supports the software as a service solution [SaaS].

When preparing notes for this post, I was worried that I might be infringing copyright law (how ironic) but decided in the end that since I have given full attribution and that I have only referred to a few short sections of the book (less than a chapter or 5%), it would probably be ok.